WebCite

WebCite is an on-demand archive site, designed to digitally preserve scientific and educationally important material on the web by taking snapshots of Internet contents as they existed at the time when a blogger or a scholar cited or quoted from it. The preservation service enabled verifiability of claims supported by the cited sources even when the original web pages are being revised, removed, or disappear for other reasons, an effect known as link rot. The site no longer accepts new archive requests; old archive snapshots can still be viewed. WebCite allowed for preservation of all types of web content, including HTML web pages, PDF files, style sheets, JavaScript and s. It also archived metadata about the collected resources such as access time, MIME type, and content length. WebCite was a non-profit consortium supported by publishers and editors, and it could be used by individuals without charge. It was one of the first services to offer on-demand archiving of pages, a feature later adopted by many other archiving services, such as archive.today and the Wayback Machine. It did not do web page crawling. Conceived in 1997 by Gunther Eysenbach, WebCite was publicly described the following year when an article on Internet quality control declared that such a service could also measure the citation impact of web pages. In the next year, a pilot service was set up at the address webcite.net. Although it seemed that the need for WebCite decreased when Google's short term copies of web pages began to be offered by Google Cache and the Internet Archive expanded their crawling (which started in 1996), WebCite was the only one allowing "on-demand" archiving by users. WebCite also offered interfaces to scholarly journals and publishers to automate the archiving of cited links. By 2008, over 200 journals had begun routinely using WebCite. WebCite was formerly a member of the International Internet Preservation Consortium.